The titles iPhoto chooses for just-added photos is the annoying “IMG_nnnn” serial number from the camera. This AppleScript simply takes the date of the photo (EXIF info that iPhoto knows very well) and uses it as the photo title. The format is: yyyy-mm-dd-hh.mm.ss, so it’s a bit easier to read than the ISO version, but also easily sortable. Here’s the code: tell application “iPhoto” — activate — bring... 

Are you curious, like me, about the new Single Window Mode (most excellent; see this article at Ars for more details) available in the newest unstable 2.7.x GIMP releases? Well, sadly, the final and stable GIMP 2.8 release won’t come out before the end of this year, and there are still no experimental 2.7.x binary releases available for Mac OS X (via X11). One could always try to compile everything from source, but that might be quite complicated... 

I have several sites that I access on both my iPhone and desktop, so I like to have quick access to them via the Bookmarks Bar. However, these sites have different versions for the desktop, for mobiles, and, in some cases, yet another version for the iPhone. Usually, the full version doesn’t work so well on the iPhone, and the iPhone version is undesirable on the desktop. Instead of creating a plain bookmark, a little Javascript can make... 

At my office, I needed to find a way to turn of the wireless network when someone plugged in their network cable. I also did not want them to be able to turn the wireless network back on until the network cable was unplugged. I came up with the fallowing solution. I created a launchDaemon called com.companyname.ethernetmonitor , and saved it in /System  Read More →

Frequently we need to clean a directory before zipping it or copying it to an external USB drive to be used by Windows or Linux users. Apple Finder has the custom of populating directories with those unavoidable .DS_Store files, volumes with .Trashes , and some files (especially pictures) with ._resources . The following interactive script will safely remove these files prior to copying. #!/bin/sh # bash script to clean (delete) Finder .DS_Store,... 

I use a couple of shell scripts that use Growl to remind me to run SuperDuper backups. The first script ( backupcompleted ) is set to run after each SuperDuper backup. It writes a timestamp into an invisible file called .lastbackup in my home directory; here’s the script: #!/bin/bash # This script is run by SuperDuper each time a backup is completed. date “+%s” > ~/.lastbackup The second script ( lastbackup ) reads the .lastbackup... 

Most of us know that Quicktime X, included with Snow Leopard, can trim movie and audio files. However, this trim is less than precise, as you cannot specify an exact trim start and stop point. Worse yet, if you want to make 10 minute segments for YouTube, you have to write down the last trim end time, undo the previous trim after uploading, and hope the trim slider will let you select the same trim point to start your next clip. What a pain. Enter... 

Over the weekend, I plugged in my old-style 80GB iPod for the first time in, well, a long time — so long that the battery needed to be charged a bit before it would even sync. Once the sync started, things seemed to go well, but near the end of the photos section, iTunes displayed a message telling me there wasn’t enough room to copy all my photos. This was a bit odd, because best as I could recall, my iPod had about 20GB of free space... 

I bought a new iMac and went crazy with Faces in iPhoto. Two days later I had a lot of tagged photos in Faces. Then I noticed that since I synced my Address Book with Google Contacts, Address Book entries were appearing as suggestions in Faces. I didn’t want to re-tag all my existing Faces photos, but there didn’t seem to be an obvious way to link a new Address Book contact to an existing Face. So I took the only honorable course of... 

If you regularly use a language that requires letters with diacritics — such as , , , , , , , , etc. as they are used in Spanish, French or Portuguese — and you recently switched from Windows to Mac OS X as I have, you might find this hint useful. In Windows, while there were various ways to enter these characters, the best one of them was just to enter a ‘ and then the vowel, and you would get the accented version of that letter... 

A few days ago, I wanted to get iTunes to accept my AmEx Gift Card, but somehow it always said the security code was invalid. Different from VISA and MasterCard, the security code from an AmEx Card is on the front and is four digits long. There was no doubt this code was in fact valid, and I was typing it correctly. Obviously I wasn’t the only one with this problem — Apple’s Support Discussion Board was filled with people complaining... 

If you download a file with Safari or certain other programs, you may be able to copy its download URL from its Get Info window. Select the file in the Downloads folder (or elsewhere) and press command-I. Find the Where From ntry in the More Info section of the Get Info window. Hold down the mouse button and drag across the URL listed there to select it, then choose Copy from the Edit menu (or press Command-C). [ robg adds: This will only work... 

Want to do quick and dirty image editing on the fly? Let Image Events do the work for you. I created a free AppleScript app, which I’ve named uPad; download the script (112KB) ( macosxhints mirror — but use the original link as long as it works.), and then read on for some notes on how to use it… uPad is an image manipulation utility that can convert, crop and pad, scale, and rotate images. It’s an AppleScript that uses... 

I really like browsing without all the flashy ads around, so I’ve been using the filtering-proxy Privoxy now for many years. But there is no longer support for Mac OS X, as there isn’t a maintainer for the Mac OS X port any more. MacPorts still has 3.0.12, which has some major bugs (timeouts), so I decided to build from source. Here’s how to get it run… First, get the source for Privoxy 3.0.16 from SourceForge ( 1.7MB direct... 

Over the weekend, I was installing a demo of some web-based help desk software, and this particular package used encrypted PHP files. With my hosting company, I have to place a php.ini file in every directory that contains encrypted files, or the site won’t work. This particular package had hundreds of directories, buried in folders and subfolders, and I was dreading the task of copying this one file …  Read More →